SHARPS (Supporters for the Health And Rights of People in the Semiconductor Industry)
Mission Statement
- On November 20, 2007, 19 civil society organizations formed a joint committee
SHARPS is a non-governmental organization dedicated to protecting the health and human rights of workers in the semiconductor and electronics industries.
We work to achieve recognition of occupational diseases affecting semiconductor workers and support workers so they can work in safe and healthy conditions. Our activities include counseling and assistance for victims of occupational illnesses, support for workers’ compensation claims, research on workplace hazards, advocacy for policy and institutional reform, and solidarity with domestic and international labor and human rights organizations.
Through these efforts, SHARPS seeks to prevent industrial diseases, ensure corporate accountability, and promote dignity, safety, and justice for all workers in the semiconductor and electronics industries.
Semiconductors: A Field Guide ๐๐
By Xiaowei R. Wang and Ann Chen
Water and time circulate and transform. Yet industrial processes and capitalism have rendered water and time as purely linear: whether the inputs of water and outputs of wastewater or the narrative of time being an arrow of linear progress. In this field guide we look at the long legacy of electronics, specifically chips manufacturing in a trans-Pacific geography โ across East Asia and Silicon Valley since the 1960s. The intent of this field guide is to:
Highlight organizations and people who have been organizing around semiconductor manufacturing and pollution since the 1960s, specifically issues of water usage and wastewater.
Support other researchers, organizers and activists who are thinking about semiconductor pollution and resource use with citations, references and a general overview of a complex technical process.
This field guide is by no means complete. We hope it can function as a resource that pulls together different networks, serving as a foundation for ongoing scholarly research, as well as support continued, on-the-ground organizing across different geographies.
In creating a constellation of people, events, and places located in connected places and moments in time, we want to highlight the real and ongoing struggles in occupational and environmental health within chip manufacturing, particularly an era where the tech industry has created a narrative around the inevitability of AI and ubiquitous digitization: whether the constructed imperative towards closing the โdigital divideโ or the use of AI, blockchain, IoT (Internet of Things) across almost every industry. As many researchers, writers and activists have documented, AI is not a dematerialized medium. In particular, AI relies on the expansion of data centers, the increased use of energy and water resources for those data centers, as well as the very real material, geopolitical and labor consequences of mining as well as creating training data for AI (1).
For the purposes of this field guide, we look broadly at resource use and ecological impacts of semiconductor manufacturing over the past 60 years. We look at the use of water and wastewater specifically. For this field guide, we conducted interviews and site visits collaboratively in the winter of 2024-25. We spoke with the RCA Workers Care Association/Taiwan Associational for Victims of Occupational Health Injuries (Facebook / Website), SHARPS/Banolim (Supporters for the Health and Rights of People in the Semiconductor Industry), Shih Yueh Ying of Changhua Environmental Protection Union, Sandy Peng (Peng Kuei Chih) of Clean Water Action Alliance in Hsinchu (Facebook / Website), Hsu Po-Jen of the Environmental Rights Foundation in Taipei and Tsao Yu Chun, a former researcher of Citizen of the Earth who wrote her masterโs thesis on water resources and governance in Hsinchu (home to TSMCโs main semiconductor fabs). Additionally, we would like to thank Professors Ya-Chung Chuang ย and Hua-Mei Chiu for their help and support on these topics, as well as artist and curator Min-hyung Kang and translator Christine Cheng.